In 1997, the name Slashdot was cool, because most people really weren't familiar with the idea of web addresses: we'd tell them to go to "slash slash slash-dot dot org" and their eyes would glaze over. The /. site was pretty cool, too. It was billed as "News for Nerds" and the net had a very high proportion of nerds back then.

What it didn't have was a plethora of blogs where someone could post a short story with a link so that thousands of people could pile in and discuss it. But at the time, I thought of Slashdot more as a replacement for Usenet newsgroup discussions than a precursor of blogging.

Either way, Slashdot soon became so popular that it gave rise to "the Slashdot effect". Slashdotters would see a new user-submitted story and click the link, and the target site would promptly collapse under the sheer weight of visitors. Sites that carried stories about Linux and open source, and geeky science news, usually hadn't been set up to handle huge spikes in traffic.

Naturally, many people tried to exploit the Slashdot effect, including me. There was no quicker way to get noticed.

Unfortunately, one of the downsides of nerdy sites is that they attract loads of nerds. These are the people who don't have girlfriends or proper jobs; who live on pizza in their parents' basement, and rarely see the sun; who have an encyclopedic knowledge of Star Wars but no common sense. It's a running gag on Slashdot that everyone is like that, even though they're not.

Slashdot's standard nerd hypocrisy is another running gag. Everyone knows that anything related to Apple/Linux/open source is innovative and cool, whereas if Microsoft had done exactly the same thing, it would be evil and monopolistic. Double standards rule.

But unlike Usenet, Slashdot has an innovative and cool Karma system to bury a lot of the rubbish. Comments are labelled (flamebait, troll, redundant, insightful, interesting, informative, funny etc) and rated, and Slashdotters can vote them up or down. The perceptive comments should therefore get voted up to +4 or +5 while the stupid ones are voted down to -1. If you browse Slashdot with a threshold set at +3, you can read the best and ignore the rest.

The good stuff on Slashdot is still very good, but perhaps the site is past its best. Although it has expanded beyond the nerd ghetto into politics and YRO (Your Rights Online), the site has been superseded by newcomers such as Digg and Reddit, Techmeme and Tailrank and other sources of news links. Slashdot's responses to this competition – which include Idle and Firehose – don't seem to have the same sort of momentum.

Any site that has signed up more than a million members and has several million visitors a month is clearly getting lots of things right. It's still the primary place for nerds to discuss news. However, as the internet grows, the proportion of nerds declines, and so does Slashdot's relative importance.